With a busy schedule and a stressful last few months, I haven’t had time to watch movies lately. Last night was different, after riding my bike for about 68 kilometers, I felt super fresh and ecstatic. I was in the mood, I had work that I was supposed to do, but I chose to procrastinate. I was ready for some movies after a long time, so was my roommate. He said he was in the mood for a horror movie. I’m not entirely a fan of horror movies but I was down for anything. We decided on IT Chapter 2, but 5 minutes into the movie, we were already bored so decided to look for something else. 

I had seen tweets about this one movie, the one that popped on the “Best thriller/horror movies of 2019”. “Oh, I’ve heard of this a lot lately, let’s watch this movie”, I recommended. My friends went along with it and started watching “The Platform”.

I don’t want to go through the story-line/plot of the movie, what I found interesting about the weirdly satisfying movie was the metaphorical roller-coaster that it drives you through. It’s just my analysis and opinion, which could be very different from what the directors were aiming for. I have two different views about the movie both intersect at some point or on the big picture or the central idea. Throughout the movie, the plot line deals with one thing, a subtle form of Darwinism, an economic Darwinism, if that could be a right term. 

The protagonist finds himself, actually he volunteers to fall into this system with different levels, which metaphorically might show different socioeconomic levels of people in any society or country. There exists a number of variations within the populations of a society, what he assumes in the movie to be 250, even for an idealist, he finds that there are levels that he hasn’t even seen yet. The initial part of his interview before getting into the system kind of hints at his “middle class state” meaning he is sanitized with the lower level systems, yet his assumption of the depth of the level turns astray when he actually dives into the depth, which is very dark and no one usually ventures there. And it’s filled with hunger, pain and sorrow. But even at the darkest chasm there are those fighting everyday to make the best out of their lives and somehow succeed in making that possible. 

The whole thing about different levels could be depicting classes or economic levels. The ones at the top or the people closest to the “System” get everything but when it goes down to all the levels, people barely have any resources to use. If and only if people used resources that are just enough for them, there wouldn’t be any problem as such. If everyone practiced the art of “only what you need”. But people tend to over exploit the resources which is creating a bottleneck for others who live below you on the capitalistic levels. The protagonists’ first cellmate might be a metaphor for someone who gets sucked into the system, not a bad guy to start with but made into one by the system. The second cellmate, who once was the part of the system but falls down the same line, meaning you could easily get shuffled around, which actually happens to everyone in the cell. The gas that’s used to put them down until their level is changed could be a metaphor for a scheme that changes your social status or may be to show how fragile the economic status can be in a rapidly changing capitalistic scenario. One day you’re on the top of the food chain and the next day, it’s about eating or being eaten. People jumping off from one cell to the bottom could be a metaphor for those who want to get out of the system, those who give up and what that does? That creates more opportunity for the others, as in food while talking about the movie. A job lost for someone means a job opportunity for someone in a real world, I guess. There’s just too many details in the movie that could be analyzed in so many different ways. The child, for instance, could be a metaphor for how there are people who struggle in their daily life, fighting just for the basic needs, but yet somehow some of them manage to survive in the most unlikely situation. The mother’s role shows how much struggle there is in our society for some to just make it through. In a world of survival of the fittest, there are exceptions to that not the best “fitted” individual makes it through hard work and persistence from someone who loves them. The sacrifice of a mother to make sure that the child gets through hunger shows that there are people who have a hard life but that doesn’t stop them from making it through.

Another way that I kind of looked at the movie is through utilization of resources, taking the child as the next generation, our generation or the generation before us, used/over exploited all the resources that there is, which left a mother to fight for her offspring so that she could be part of the resources. If we only used resources that are enough for us to get by, there would be resources for people in the next level, which could be taken as the next generation. Goreng could be one of those rebels who wants to make sure that our offspring see/ use the resources in the earth that we are seeing. We definitely don’t want to leave the next generation in a total darkness in a messed up cell with no or very less food resources or just the platform with rubbish and nothing else. The child could literally mean “next generation” and that’s what the movie might have meant by “She is the message”. Maybe the next generation is the message and the food havoc, which was one of the major points of the movie, might be over-exploitation of our natural resources.

I guess there could be more ways to look into the movie, but this was what I thought after finishing the movie!